I tend to agree with Tristero (at Hullaballoo) and his take that the debasement of our public discourse is far scarier than the President's apparent unwillingness to crap in his pants on national television, as suggested in this Maureen Dowd column that can only be explained as "inexplicable"... the ending lines summing it up best:

Our professorial president is no feckless W., biking through Katrina. He is no doubt on top of the crisis in terms of studying it top to bottom. But his inner certainty creates an outer disconnect.

He’s so sure of himself and his actions that he fails to see that he misses the moment to be president — to be the strong father who protects the home from invaders, who reassures and instructs the public at traumatic moments.

He’s more like the aloof father who’s turned the Situation Room into a Seminar Room.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, actually trying to understand the problem and fix it, acording to Maureen Dowd, is a bad thing.

WTF? This is the vaunted New York Times, giving this valuable op-ed real estate to this twit (who called the President "Obambi" because he didn't show enough testosterone for Maureen on the campaign trail.)

The President's performance has left much to be desired, but frankly, stylistic issues are not the problem. The problem is substance: the Obama approach to counter-terrorism is the same as George W. Bush's. Period. Right down to pointlessly escalating a war, apparently starting a war yet somewhere else, keeping the same Secretary of Defense, and arguing for exactly the same dictatorial powers in courts that the Bush Administration argued for... and I'll talk about Guantanamo a bit later. It's as simple as that: if you have a problem with Obama, it is that he is giving us "the third George W. Bush term." Sorry, boys and girls, but John McCain would have been different... maybe (hell, probably) no better... but without doubt... different.

Stupid style points because poow widdle Mauween doesn't have a sense of secuwity are... irrelevant. But as Tristero notes above, this is what now passes for public discourse.

And so... here we go again. I'd like all of these things approached soberly... and I'd like all of these problems to be approached differently from the...troubling... way that they were handled under the Bush Administration, instead of in the identical way they were handled by the Bush Administration. And that...rather than some fantasy about daddies... is what I want.